Chaplain Turner's War

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CHAPLAIN TURNER'S WAR: Compelled to serve where the suffering was greatest, he headed to Iraq.

Comfort in the toughest of places

CHAPTER 5:
Nightmare revisited

CHAPTER 7:
Spiritual protection

By MONI BASU — Chaplain Darren Turner stands at the entrance to Ward 45-C at Walter Reed Army Medical Center with a special coin in his pocket and trepidation in his heart. He is here to see a warrior who only two months earlier was hunting insurgents in Iraq — and is now a man without three limbs.

Spc. David Battle arrived here on Christmas Day, his legs and right arm blown off in a roadside bombing. On this dreary February afternoon, doctors still are not certain he will survive.

David Battle is a trophy of war. That's how Turner describes the nation's wounded.

Home on leave from Iraq, the Georgia chaplain did not have to visit Battle. He wanted to. He wanted to make this difficult journey before he must make another. ... MORE

About the series

In January, reporter Moni Basu and photographer Curtis Compton began documenting life at war with Darren Turner, chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, part of the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart.

They traveled with him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington while he was home on leave, then caught up with him in Iraq, where they spent five weeks reporting this story.

They shadowed the chaplain as he counseled soldiers, baptized them and dealt with war's hardships. They also went on foot patrol with a platoon that lost six men last summer.

Every soldier in this story gave the journalists permission to document their interactions with the chaplain. All except one of the scenes were witnessed firsthand. The one reconstructed scene &mdash the events of last summer — appears in Chapter 3 and was pieced together through interviews with soldiers who were there.

AJC SPECIAL REPORT